The City of Research Institutes: Notes on the Nuclear Topology

Abstract

In the article the existence of Obninsk - the Soviet city of nuclear institutes and high-tech industries assembled in 1956 from the secret settlements of physicists mobilized for the Soviet atomic projec is considered form the perspective of topology (Law, 2004; Shields, 2013). It means that special attention is paid to the issues of connectivity, proximity and neighborhood in urban arrangements. Here, however, specific forms of connectivity and proximity are discussed, conditioned by the properties of nuclear materiality, limitations of secrecy and institutional affiliation of local communities and infrastructures. Comparing the city of a dozen research institutes with other cities built by the Ministry of Medium Machine Building, the author describes it as a hybrid form of nuclear urbanism and an operator of the Sredmash sociality. Obninsk assemblage is problematized in the text, and its spatialized becoming is described in terms of nuclear topology. Basing on the material of the research interviews from the Obninsk project collection and unique archive sources, three ways for assembling the Obninsk sets are outlined: the discursive gathering of institutions by their ex-directors, spatial layouts of nuclear elements (including those caused by regime) and assembling of inter-institute research programs. The secrecy accompanying nuclear elaboration is described as a spatialized practice of fencing localizations and imposed sites. Particular attention is paid to the contribution that boundary nuclear objects - the reactor, fuel elements, short-lived isotopes - make to assembling of the Obninsk sets. Three strategies of inter-institutional cooperation in research programs are described: neighbor assistance, secret cooperation in defense research programs with mediation of Sredmash and proactive interdisciplinary соoperation. Performing the technosocial history of the persent, the author questioning about conditions of (non)possibility of developing the Obninsk nuclear cluster.